Hello again. Now,as I sit here, looking out the window, with the snow all around, my thoughts hover closely on this spring, summer and fall and what I want to do in the garden (as do we all). And like all projects that are really long-term, it’s difficult to think so many months ahead, not knowing what the weather is going to be like, what sots of problems we might meet and so on.

But, that’s what we have to do, because the best way to end up with what you want to go into the fall and winter with in the garden is to start thinking about it now. I’ll use lavender as my example because that’s what I’ve got pictures of.

Last year, we started growing a lot more (or, what seemed to me to be a lot more) lavender in one of the beds out at the farm. I wanted plants to sell and lavender to pick. I’d ordered lavender plugs (baby plants) from wholesalers, but again, I didn’t know how popular they’d be or how they’d do. And frankly, we ended up selling a whole lot of lavender plants and had a few of each sort in the bed come summer and the light bulb went off in my head at the beginning of August: I’d better start thinking about 2018: if I didn’t want to have to order more plants, I’d better take cuttings right then. (more…)

For readers who have been following us for a while, you know that we’ve been doing agricultural development at a piece of abandoned farm property that we bought a couple of years ago.

Well, we’ve certainly moved forward!!

This spring, we started having plant sales and we now have a real web site and a Face book page! There will be links pointing back and forth between the various sites to keep everyone up to date on what we are doing.

At all times of the year, we see questions on gardening/landscaping sites with regard to ‘when do I prune my flowering shrubs?’

The issue, people, revolves around — does the plant flower(that is, set buds which then open up) on ‘old wood’ or on ‘new wood’. Now, this is actually a lot more complicated than it looks, frankly, because you can’t give a blanket statement on this. But in general:Old Wood:
You have a shrub. It is now October or November. The growth that took place THIS YEAR, is now ‘old wood’. It’s brown on the outside/green on the inside. (more…)

Over the years, your old Aunty has tried many times to root rose cuttings. I have what I’d call a ‘nostalgia rose’ bush at Chez Siberia. When the DH and I got married and rented our first house, my mom went out to the garden with a spade, whacked off a chunk of the old rose bush growing there (it was probably put in when the house was built in 1917 – a very old rose). No one knew what rose it was – it’s has flattish blossoms with a gillion little petals on it, once a year, in June. The fragrance is definitely ‘knock your socks off’. It throws off long canes with huge thorns. But they reminded me of home. When we move to Chez Siberia, we dug the thing up and took it with us and put it next to the deck. It’s not in a very good spot – it’s very exposed, so many times, if we have a bad winter, I end up having to prune it almost to the ground to get off all the dead stuff, but it comes back. (more…)

Well, with night-time frosts banging on the door, we harvested everything harvestable in the big garden (the test garden, which, if you’ve been following had four beds with different soil treatments: buckwheat, mustard, black plastic and nothing). And in the interest of completing as ‘scientific’ an analysis, the DH and I hauled out big cardboard boxes which I dutifully labeled and set them at the ends of the appropriate rows. Everything that got taken from the buckwheat row ended up in the buckwheat boxes and so on. When we got everything home, we washed it all carefully, counted items, weighed them and tabulated the results. (more…)

At this time of the year, we’re either weeding, watering or picking veggies out of the garden. We’re inundated with hot peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes and zuccini here at Chez Siberia and lots of what we put into the beds at the property to test out soil treatments (as you recall, we did four beds: black plastic, no treatment at all, mustard and buckwheat) are maturing. Frankly at this point in the cycle, I can say, without any hesitation that the mustard treatment won. Hands down. Now, it might be difficult to measure that, though I did get out there with a measuring tape and measured the corn and the sizes of the squashes and pumpkins. Every other bed is behind the mustard-treated bed. I’ll even forgive the deer (or the ground hog or whatever it is that ate half a squash that we discovered). But we now know that growing mustard, chopping it up, tilling it in and waiting two weeks after a rain just was fantastic – at this point, even though everything was planted the same way, on the same day, and treated the same way (that is, we watered everything in well on the day we put in the seeds), everything in the mustard-treated bed is bigger, taller, and more mature (like, the corn in the mustard bed has brown tassels and ears which are filling out – in the other beds? Meh). No way to argue with that.

But I’m sure no one wants to read about my adventures with weeding and shoveling wood chip mulch on all of my flower beds, right? Right? (yes, you in the back; no – I can’t think of any discussion more boring than mulch at the moment) So, instead, we’re going to take about taking cuttings. (more…)

Well, it’s that time of the year again. Or actually, it would be that time of the year in several weeks except that with the hot and extremely dry weather we had this summer, the garlic (as you can see from the photo) basically gave up the ghost and went ‘toes up’ (as we say here in the country) about 2-3 weeks early. We were trialing the two ‘winners’ from last year (Susanville and Vietnamese Red) against three ‘new’ varieties, Music (which actually we’ve grown before), Premium Northern White (which around here is the standard garlic grown by market gardeners) and Early Italian Red. Well, the growing season threw us and the garlic bulbs a complete fluke — hot and incredibly dry from the spring through frankly this weekend, when we finally got some concentrated rainfall for two days. (more…)

You would think that your dear old Aunty would never admit to doing this, but I did.

I was seduced (seduced! I say) by marketing copy and price. “These pruners are designed for comfort for people with small hands.”

Small hands.

Yes, they were comfortable and I do have small hands (not small for my size, actually – I’m pretty short and the hand size goes along with that). And I have to admit that they were referred to as ‘light duty’.

‘Light duty’ must have meant ‘trimming the spent heads off perennials’ of some such thing because as you can see from the photo at the top, they gave up the ghost.

For a closer idea of what happened, here is your requisite close up:Steel casting that just frankly got pushed beyond its spec. Which must have been something like 1/8″ in diameter.

OK, I admit it. I push tools long past their useful life. I have a tendency to ‘horse’ (as my dear departed father would express it) the thing around and then when the handle flies to pieces or something gets bent, well, I have no one to blame but myself.

So, I bought myself a new, bigger set of pruners (with the new! improved! rotating handles which will be so much better for my ‘small hands’), which are specified for 3/4″ diameter branches.

Do you have any idea who small a 3/4″ diameter branch actually IS? That’s smaller than the diameter of your thumb. 80% of what we have to cut back and cut down (fie, honeysuckle! Fie!) here at Chez Siberia qualifies as being over 3/4″ in diameter.

What to do?

Well, our next ‘weapon of mass destruction’ is the set of loppers. loppers
We own a set of these and although they say they will handle anything up to 2″ in diameter, I have to tell you that anything over 1″ requires some rather interesting body mechanics on my part so that I can wedge both handles into my chest so that I can use the force of both arms. It works but it…leaves a mark.

Another option for the 2″ plus is a pruning saw, and we’ve found them to be both easy to use and very effective, even on branches which are 3″ in diameter. I happen to like the folding one (that is, the blade folds into the handle), which makes it easier to slip into a pocket. The teeth on these are rather impressive and we use them to cut right to the trunk, which makes pruning fruit trees a lot more effective.

Finally, I have to bring up the last and most destructive (and frankly, most dangerous) tool to cut off branches: The powered chain saw. There are models on offer which are so small that one might be tempted to try to use it one-handed (ack!). If you have a lot of nasty huge bushes (with big 6″ trunks to get through), a chain saw is your tool of choice unless you go for an axe (which has it’s own skill set and dangers as well). Anything with that level of power can cut off pieces of bodies very easily and if you are considering getting one, find a dealer which offers a workshop on using one safely. The DH wears a helmet (with a face shield, metal screen and ear protection) and Kevlar chaps whenever he uses our chain saw and I think everyone should wear safety equipment when they use anything like that. He also wears steel-toed heavy boots with thick soles and wide heels to give himself a solid position when he uses it.

In the end, however, the point is this: Don’t try to use a tool for other than its intended use and buy the size for the job.

As I discussed last time, we’re late, late, late in getting the experimental garden in. Actually, looking around at what’s happening to the corn fields in our area, we’re not the only ones who got ‘the garden’ in late.

Timing, is everything, but again, as discussed, the weather this spring (thank you El Nino) was horrific. Too cold and wet at all the wrong times. The farmers are feeling it too. I have seen very few corn fields out there where the growth is uniform and uniformly bright green. I’m seeing lots of stress. (more…)